Engagement rates across all display ads will increase by 50 percent. As ads become less cluttered, more relevant, more engaging and more attractive, we’ll see the rate at which people interact with display ads (such as watching videos or playing games) increase dramatically.

Display ads? Really?

Punching monkeys and laughing babies are going to change the face of banner ads, huh? We’re no longer going to view display ads as a necessary evil, but instead will enjoy engaging with them? I find that somewhat hard to believe, don’t you? Of course, Google has a vested interest in making that prediction. Just like dentists, telemarketers and politicians, Google needs to convince the world that future growth is limitless–just so long as you suspend the laws of commonsense. 😉

Not that it can’t happen, I just don’t see how display ads can get that much better in a 4-year period. 50%? The last time I heard such bold predictions, it was a shady SEO firm out of <insert third world country here> claiming in an email that they could increase my search engine traffic.

Anyway, that’s just one prediction out of 6 and, to be fair, the other 5 predictions are not so outrageous and actually quite reasonable. In fact, I suspect that if you head over to the Google blog post and read all of the predictions, you’ll feel 50% better off because of it! 😛

http://www.mccormackmorrison.com Peter McCormack

Added to this is the annoying way in which media agencies are using view through (post impression) as a tracking metric.

http://www.paulcampagna.com paul

Or they are going to trick the user into clinking on an ad. If you’ve visited ebay, they give you a link to go to “your ebay” when you sign in, but as soon as you try to click on it, it changes to an advertisement. I can’t tell you how many times I clicked just trying to go to my page, only to bring up an ad. – Then there is the stupid floating windows that have ads behind them that trigger when the window is gone. – I’m not stupid and know this helps the site get click through rates, but if you have to trick your user to meet numbers, it is not really effective except in the sites statistics on ad click rates.

I’ve noticed more and more sites trying to trick people into ad clicking. – Fail